How do companies track internal bloggers?

Missed a chance to go on TV today. MSNBC is doing a spot today on unauthorized company blogging. They called yesterday looking for an expert on how companies track employees who blog anonymously about work. I could have given them some boiler-plate stuff about search engines and consultants, but I didn't have solid up-to-date info. That's why I'm sitting at home with my laptop now instead of having my face pancaked in midtown.

Anyone know the names of companies that specialize in this service? I think it's worth looking into.

07:43 AM

Inside Companies

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There are a couple of services that track the blogs related to a company's brand targeted at brand managers and PR people. Technorati and BlogPulse both offer tools like this. I suspect their tools could easily be used to track internal bloggers as well.

Posted by: Maui at July 25, 2005 09:43 AM

Both Technorati and BlogPulse offer tools to track a brand in the blog world. These tools tend to be targeted at PR people and brand managers. I suspect their tools could easily be modified to work for this purpose. They may already have this capability.

Posted by: Maui at July 25, 2005 09:46 AM

Tracking any kind of company mention--good or bad--is the domain of prospective search, led by PubSub. As soon as the name of the company is mentioned anywhere, PubSub will alert the person(s) interested or who need to know.

Posted by: Joel Richman at July 25, 2005 10:25 AM

Yes, with prospective search, companies can (and should) monitor mentions of themselves and their products. But I'm talking about the ability to track internal anonymous bloggers. Let's say an employee at an easily-identifiable tobacco company writes anonymously about operations there, and refers to it as death inc., or some other hazy name. How does the company locate this person?

Posted by: steve baker at July 25, 2005 12:27 PM

Really its a matter of thinking about the keywords internal bloggers use to describe their company. If a company is regularly monitoring the web for their brand names a company should be able to determine which sites are covering their company over time. Any number of companies provide this information from Feed Search engines to web search engines.

Posted by: john cass at July 25, 2005 12:38 PM

Was there an intention to distinguish between blogging and other web and internet channels, such as discussion forums and web sites? I suspect that some people may now be casually using the term "blog" for any form of informal web or internet publishing, or maybe simply trying to trade off the "buzz" of the term even if it is recognized that non-blog informal distribution channels are just as big a potential problem as blogs.

But to the point about anonymity, are you asking about tools that *enable* anonymity, or tools that mislead people into thinking that it is technically feasible to *unmask* anonymity or faked identities?